A Climb Up The Scott Monument…

It’s day 11 of Blogmas, and I’ve achieved yet another one of my goals for the year! Back in my “21 Goals at 21” post, I said that I wanted to “do at least one thing that scares me”. This was mostly due to the fact that there’s quite a large number of things that scare me, and I wanted to look back and think “I overcame that fear”. This post wasn’t meant to be on such a topic, though! I actually travelled through to Edinburgh for the day to visit the Christmas markets there, and I planned on taking lots of pretty photos and write up a post on that.

Alas, we ended up passing the Scott Monument, a Gothic-style monument located in Princes Street Gardens – I’d passed it numerous times when visiting the capital, and upon learning you could climb stairs within it to reach the top, I was intrigued. I mentioned my interest in doing so, and next thing, we were inside and slowly making our way up the narrowest set of stairs I’d ever come across. Now, something I don’t tend to mention on the blog is the fact that I am a very panicky person; I get chest pains at the thought of the simplest things, despite being pretty confident. It’s the most annoying thing ever just because I’m actually quite outgoing and it’s totally out of my control, so when it happens it’s really unexpected!

Just as I started to lose faith in my legs holding up, we finally reached the platform outside… except everything still looked really close. That was when I realised that there was actually four sets of these horrific stairs, and this was only the first platform. I decided to push on and follow everyone else right up to the top, but as the steps started getting smaller and narrower, and the handrail disappeared, I realised that I was going to have an incredibly hard time trying to convince myself to head back down. When we finally reached the top, I tried not to think about the imminent descent. Taking some photos of the market and views around us took my mind off it!

Eventually we started climbing back down – I don’t think I’ve been that shaky since having to do flute recitals at school concerts years ago – bad times – but somehow I (very slowly) managed to force myself to suck it up and keep going. At one point we had to stop to let another two people get past (at one of the narrowest parts, very convenient) and I had to explain that I couldn’t make any more room for fear of falling to my death and apologise about a hundred times. At that point I definitely considered calling for assistance, but I got through it. Somehow. And now I’m safe back on the ground, I’m definitely considering taking out some sort of life insurance plan.

ANYWAY. Here’s the nice photos I managed to get amidst my crisis in the Edinburgh skyline:

Admiring the markets from afar… very afar

Yet another goal that I’ve achieved, but will never, ever do again :))))))